Asking Well: Negotiation Secrets for Young Entreprenuers

For young founders and startup execs, nearly everything involves negotiation — negotiating for time, attention, money, commitments, and resources — and in order to succeed they have to quickly learn how to ask well.

“Every day is a negotiation for an entrepreneur,” writes Selena Rezvani, President of NextGenWomen and author of Pushback: How Smart Women Ask – And Stand Up – For What They Want. That’s what makes “perfecting the art of the ask” so important. “We can use it to go after what we want, to create options where there were previously none, and we can use it to defend what is ours and what we need,” Rezvani writes.

In a guest post for Fast Company, Rezvani offers tips for mastering negotiation, arguing that one of the most important things a negotiator can do is establish the pace of the negotiation and “peel the onion back, layer by layer, as you exchange views, calling only on what you need, when you need it.” She also advises that a negotiator needs to “be willing to make assertive claims but be equally comfortable giving up or adding on provisions that sweeten the deal for the other side.” For more negotiation secrets, read Rezvani’s full post here.